A Time Lord villain introduces Rasputin to disco music? Yes please!
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00:00Exposed to the time vortex, Rose Tyler, now in the form of the Bad Wolf,
00:04says that she can see everything. All that is, all that was, all that ever could be.
00:10There's been a great many could-bes in Doctor Who's past five decades, and the road from 1963
00:16to 2022 is littered with half-finished scripts and rejected pitches. So, with that in mind then,
00:23I'm Ellie with WhoCulture, here with 10 unmade Doctor Who stories we wish we'd seen.
00:3010. Rose was actually created by the Doctor. Russell T Davies' first series of Doctor Who
00:36nearly featured a script written by another lauded British screenwriter. Davies approached
00:42his friend Paul Abbott to write an episode for the series, and the pair had previously worked
00:47together on Abbott's BBC series Linda Green, which also featured Christopher Eccleston.
00:53Abbott's episode would have explored the idea that Rose was an experiment by the Doctor to
00:57create his perfect companion. The idea was never developed much further than that, due to Abbott's
01:02commitments with the increasingly popular Shameless. And it's not clear in the small
01:07amount of information given by RTD how exactly the Doctor bred Rose for this purpose. Wibbly-wobbly,
01:14timey-wimey engineered Pete and Jackie's courtship, perhaps? It is strange to think how different the
01:20tone of the show would have been if the Doctor had been revealed to be a manipulative geneticist.
01:25The Doctor has manipulated companions before, of course, but it does seem at odds with the
01:30lighter, more accessible tone of the 2005 reboot. 9. Killer Cats of Gallifrey
01:37In a follow-up to The Deadly Assassin, the Doctor Who production team wanted to return to Gallifrey
01:42for the following season. That story ended up being The Invasion of Time, but the original pitch
01:48for the season 15 finale was quite different. Killers of the Dark would have revealed that
01:54the planet of the Time Lords was also home to a race of cat people whose culture was similar to
01:59those of Asian countries. Not much is known about the story, other than it was to feature a gladiator
02:05style battle in front of a stadium full of cat people. Perhaps this would have written out Leela
02:10the way Louise Jameson had always wanted, sacrificing her life in battle for the Doctor.
02:15David Weir's script got as far as the costume stage, with designer Dee Robson submitting
02:20some design sketches. In the end, script editor Anthony Reed and director Gerald Blake decided
02:26it would be far too difficult to achieve on Doctor Who's already tight budget. Instead,
02:32they opted to make Invasion of Time, which introduced us to the Outsiders instead,
02:37Gallifrey's cheaper-to-realise humanoid population who had turned their backs on Time Lord society.
02:438. Jamie's Happy Ending The ending of The War Games was
02:48heartbreaking. Sent back to their appropriate time and place,
02:51Jamie and Zoe are wiped of their memories of their many adventures with the Doctor.
02:56Not so bad for Zoe, who returns to a fairly comfortable life on a space station,
03:01but Jamie faces a much harder life. Returned back to his life following the Battle of Culloden,
03:07he faces slavery, murder, or as detailed in one comic by the legendary Grant Morrison,
03:14madness. His ending, however, was almost much more hopeful.
03:18In a story that would have formed the third part in a Yeti trilogy,
03:22he and the TARDIS would arrive at a Scottish castle owned by an ageing Laird.
03:26The castle is soon under siege from the Great Intelligence and the Yeti.
03:30The Doctor defeats them, and Jamie decides to stay on at the castle, becoming its new Laird.
03:35He falls in love with a local girl, Fiona, and is left to live happily ever after.
03:40The story was never filmed due to an ongoing copyright dispute between the BBC and the
03:45writers Melvin Haysman and Henry Lincoln, who eventually withdrew their script.
03:50And so, Jamie was left to his fate on the fields of Culloden.
03:55Number 7. Matt Berry as the Meddlesome Monk.
03:58Peter Harness, who co-wrote the dark urban thriller The Zygon Inversion slash Invasion
04:04with Stephen Moffat, pitched another story that was much lighter.
04:07The story was to feature the return of a renegade Time Lord last seen in the 1960s, The Monk.
04:13Originally played by comedy actor Peter Butterworth, Harness envisioned Matt Berry in the role.
04:19The plot was to feature the Meddlesome Time Lord calling on the Twelfth Doctor for help
04:23after he accidentally averts the Russian Revolution by playing Boney M to Rasputin.
04:29They then try to put history back on course,
04:31with The Monk eventually taking on the identity of Rasputin.
04:35It's a mad comic idea, but it might just have worked,
04:38and one can only imagine what a brilliant comedy double act Capaldi and Berry would have made.
04:44Moffat turned down the pitch, and Harness' next story for the series was the underwhelming
04:49Pyramid at the End of the World. Watching a blind Doctor trying to crack an entry code
04:53is nowhere near as much fun as him mucking around with Rasputin,
04:56Matt Berry, and the music of Boney M.
04:59Number 6. The Final Game.
05:01Introduced to the series as Moriarty to the Third Doctor's Sherlock Holmes,
05:06The Master was intended to be written out towards the end of the Pertwee era,
05:11with a storyline conceived where the former friends would do battle one last time,
05:16and during that confrontation, it was to be revealed that The Master was
05:20either The Doctor's brother or a personification of his dark side.
05:25The climactic scenes were to see The Master sacrifice himself to save The Doctor,
05:30his former friend. Whilst it was never produced, the story has been hugely influential over the
05:36years. The idea of The Master's conscience catching up with them would be a key part
05:40of Steven Moffat's final series as showrunner. Not only that, but the idea of The Master
05:45sacrificing their life to save The Doctor was echoed in the climax to The End of Time Part 2,
05:51when he forces the Time Lords back to Hell. The story was never produced due to the tragic
05:57and untimely death of actor Roger Delgado, and his loss heavily impacted Pertwee, who decided
06:03to leave the show, along with script editor Terrence Dicks and producer Barry Letts.
06:08Number 5. Return of the Autons. If Doctor Who hadn't been put on hiatus after
06:14its 22nd season, there was a whole host of adventures planned. Many of these, like the
06:20Nightmare Fair and Mission to Magnus, have since been both novelised and dramatised in
06:25the intervening years. One unmade story that remains so due to the lack of a finished script
06:31was Robert Holmes' Yellow Fever and How to Cure It. In a classic example of producer John Nathan
06:37Turner's grab-bag approach to story commissioning, it was to be set in Singapore and feature the
06:42return of the Master, the Rani, and, for the first time in over 20 years, the Autons. Also
06:48appearing would be the Brigadier, who would be in Singapore on holiday before being dragged
06:52into the adventure. All that's really known about the story is that the Master and the Rani
06:56will be disguised as street theatre performers. Now, John Nathan Turner did do a location scout,
07:03or a holiday, as some might call it, but beyond this, not much more was planned. It does sound
07:08like a little bit of an overstuffed combination of elements, but if anyone could make it work,
07:13it's Robert Holmes. Number 4. Nazis in the British Museum.
07:18Mark Gatiss has written for nearly every series of Doctor Who from 2005 to 2017,
07:24with a few gaps here and there. One of those gaps is in series 4, when his script entitled
07:30The Suicide Exhibition was dropped in favour of The Fires of Pompeii. It was held over for a
07:36potential special in the following series, but it was ultimately not made. Set in the British Museum
07:42at the height of the Blitz, it was an Indiana Jones-style adventure that pitted the Doctor
07:46and Donna against a team of Nazis trying to release something. The museum is revealed to
07:51be a giant puzzle box, and the Doctor and Donna have to deal with trap doors, booby traps,
07:56and various other nasties in order to stop the Nazis achieving their goal. While this particular
08:02story went unmade, he was able to visit another London tourist attraction when he set victory of
08:09the Daleks in Churchill's War Rooms. Number 3. The live Halloween episode.
08:15Another fourth series story that was eventually abandoned by the production team was Century
08:20House, written by Tom McRae. The writer had previously written the Cyberman two-parter
08:26for the second series, and was this time given a very different concept by Russell T Davies.
08:32Designed to function as the companion light episode, it would focus mostly on the Doctor,
08:37taking part in an episode of Most Haunted. Donna would be watching the live broadcast from home,
08:42as the Doctor and a group of TV ghost hunters investigate the haunting of the Red Widow.
08:48Davies liked the script, but he worried that following the Unicorn and the Wasp,
08:53there would be too much comedy. He also felt that he'd given the writer a poor premise,
08:58and no longer had faith in the concept. The story was eventually shelled and replaced by the RTD
09:04penned Midnight, a far scarier episode than Century House would have been. It was a fun
09:09concept, but it's unlikely we'll ever get to see it, given that TV ghost hunting isn't
09:14as popular as it used to be. Number 2. Stephen Fry's King Arthur story.
09:19How exciting was the lead-up to Doctor Who's second series? Not only had the return of the
09:26Cybermen, Sarah Jane Smith, and K-9 been revealed, but fans were also promised an episode written by
09:34Stephen Fry. The polymath author had got quite far in the writing process. He's attended the
09:40first read-through, he went for dinner with his fellow Doctor Who writers.
09:44His episode was set in the 1920s, and would feature a sci-fi spin on Arthurian legend.
09:50More specifically, the Green Knight, recently immortalised on film by Dev Patel.
09:56Fry's episode was to reveal that Gawain had survived his beheading because he was of alien
10:02origin. The finished draft was deemed too expensive to realise in its original form,
10:07and rewrites were suggested. Sadly, a multi-talented figure like Stephen Fry is
10:12constantly in demand, and so he couldn't commit to the rewrites.
10:16The story was sadly abandoned, and despite suggestion that it might have been revisited
10:21in the following series, it again never surfaced. What's even more upsetting is that the story that
10:27replaced it was the critically derided Fear Her. Sentient crayon drawings are cheaper to realise
10:34than Arthurian legends, but much less exciting. 1. Tom Baker's Doctor Who movie
10:40One of the great what-if moments in Doctor Who history is Tom Baker and Ian
10:46Martyr's proposed movie in the mid-to-late 1970s. They had a director attached, but they could never
10:53raise the funding required to make it a reality. Had it been made, it would have been an incredibly
10:59memorable combination of folk horror and psychedelic sci-fi. Doctor Who meets Scratch
11:04Man was to pit the Doctor, Harry and Sarah against scarecrows in a Scottish village,
11:09and the Devil himself, climaxing in a giant game of pinball featuring the Daleks.
11:15It's quintessentially Tom Baker. Utterly mad, but very charming.
11:20Whilst the film never saw the light of day, BBC Books did eventually commission
11:25Tom Baker to adapt his and Martyr's original treatment into a novel. It's both a creepy,
11:32blackly comedic Doctor Who adventure, and a touching tribute to the Baker era.
11:38And that concludes our list. If you can think of any that we missed, then do let us know in
11:42the comments below. And while you're there, don't forget to like and subscribe and tap that
11:46notification bell. Also, head over to Twitter and follow us there at WhoCulture, and I can be found
11:52across various social medias just by searching Ellie Littlechild. I've been Ellie with WhoCulture,
11:56and in the words of River Song herself, goodbye, sweeties.